Scorched Earth
A Global History of World War II
-
-
5.0 • 1 Rating
-
-
- $21.99
Publisher Description
An unsparing, "sweeping," and "vivid" (Drew Gilpin Faust, author of This Republic of Suffering) new history of World War II, recasting the conflict as a brutal struggle for survival among declining and ascendant imperial powers
In popular memory, the Second World War was an unalloyed victory for freedom over totalitarianism, marking the demise of the age of empires and the triumph of an American-led democratic order.
In Scorched Earth, historian Paul Thomas Chamberlin dispatches the myth of World War II as a good war. Instead, he depicts the conflict as it truly was: a massive battle beset by vicious racial atrocities, fought between rival empires across huge stretches of Asia and Europe. The war was sparked by German and Japanese invasions that threatened the old powers’ dominance, not by Allied opposition to fascism. The Allies achieved victory not through pluck and democratic idealism but through savage firebombing raids on civilian targets and the slaughter of millions of Soviet soldiers. The Soviet Union and the United States emerged as hyper-militarized new imperial powers, each laying claim to former Axis holdings across the globe before turning on one another and triggering a new forever war.
Dramatically rendered and persuasively argued, Scorched Earth shows that World War II marked the culmination of centuries of colonial violence and ushered in a new era of imperial struggle.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Historian Chamberlin (The Cold War's Killing Fields) offers a sweeping reassessment of WWII that situates the conflict within the longer arc of Western colonialism and imperialism. Not only were German and Japanese ideologies of racial superiority greatly influenced by the white supremacism inculcated for centuries by Europe's colonial powers, according to Chamberlain, but both Hitler and Japan's wartime leaders were directly inspired in their ambitions by European colonial expansion (Hitler's plan to build a German empire across Europe was modeled on America's westward expansion; Japan sought to replace the colonial empires in Asia with its own imperial "sphere"). The Allies' war efforts, Chamberlain contends, were likewise shaped by imperial ambitions: the Russians intended to dominate Europe, the British to thwart the Russians (Churchill even considered allying with Germany to attack the Soviets), and the Americans to essentially rule the world. (The Allies also entertained racial considerations, Chamberlain writes, pointing to a U.S. State Department memo expressing concern that Japanese victories would reduce "the prestige of the white race.") Chamberlain's insightful and capacious study amounts to a provocative reappraisal of WWII as merely a particularly gruesome episode in a much longer imperial power struggle (the fact, as Chamberlain observes, that immediately after the conflict the Allies began to jockey over territory themselves does seem to put paid to the theory). It's a magnificently contrarian take on the "good war."
